Welsh Witchcraft: A Guide to the Spirits, Lore, and Magic of Wales by Mhara Starling – read by Bw Bach
Wales holds a special place in my heart—my mother is Welsh, and many of my relatives live there still. Ever since I was small, traveling there to see my family always had the air of coming home; crossing the Severn Bridge from England into the green, rain-washed hills of Gwent came with an air of magic. And not without good reason—for Wales is a land of myth and legend, fairies and dragons, and it is notorious for its witches. And yet, despite its sorcerous repute, English books on Welsh witchcraft are scarce. It is precisely this scarcity that the enchanting Mhara Starling seeks to redress with Welsh Witchcraft.
The sparkling delight that Mhara takes in the vast mystical riches of Welsh culture shimmers from every page, creating what is a broad yet also deeply personal account of her craft. As a native Welsh speaker, raised on the Isle of Anglesey, Mhara has grown up in the storied landscape of the Mabinogi, and the fruits of that relationship are clear on every page. Welsh Witchcraft contains many treasures, not least authentic incantations in the Welsh language used by Wales’ cunning folk of days gone by. Containing a complementary blend of both theory and practical workings, it’s a fantastic introduction to the open and inclusive tradition of distinctively Welsh magic.
How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger — read by Carl Holmes
How to Be Animal is an unsparing account of the author's journeys across historical, metaphorical, and endangered landscapes, some of which have been rendered desolate as a consequence of human exceptionalism. In vivid yet lucid prose, it asks the reader to address their complicity in the ongoing, accelerating erosion of biodiversity and species loss characteristic of the Anthropocene era. This text prompts a reconsideration of “the human” as being, in relation to the deeply ingrained but illusory, man-made binaries that construct the environment as a nonhuman “Other” in order to justify its exploitation.
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang – read by Elizabeth Dearnley
I’ve been wanting to read this since it came out this spring and it didn’t disappoint: I read this addictively twisty tale of publishing, literary theft, and white privilege in a single sitting. Narrated by struggling writer June Hayward, who steals an unpublished manuscript from her famous frenemy Athena Liu after the latter dies in a freak accident, Yellowface chronicles June’s increasingly gasp-inducing journey towards literary fame and its consequences. As brilliantly entertaining as it is snarkily satirical, this is my favourite book of 2023.
My Husband by Maud Ventura – read by Elizabeth Kim
“After the first months of enchantment, I observed, powerless, the merging of our lives, which only wound up distancing us more.” This isn’t a book about magic or the occult, but it is a darkly funny spell of a book. My Husband has been compared to Gone Girl, and for good reason. I tore through this slim novel, told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator who is obsessed with her husband—but of course, things are not quite what they seem. At once servile and manipulative, the besotted wife has, like Madame Bovary, a romantic notion of what married life should be like. My Husband sold over 100,000 copies in France and won the Prix du Premier Roman. My husband and R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface are my favourite novels of 2023.
The Art of Grimoire by Owen Davies – read by Elizabeth Kim
This beautifully illustrated history of grimoires, from one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of magic, reminds us that magic and the occult have always existed, throughout history and cross-culturally. Grimoires are pictorial and textual forms of magic—magical books—and function as records of magical knowledge, as well as instructing magicians on how to perform spells and rituals. The scope of this book is global, featuring the Cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, pages of Japanese demon encyclopaedias, Greek papyri and ancient Chinese bamboo scripts alongside the expected medieval European manuscripts. Put forward is a compelling argument for the inclusion of grimoires in art history: such books, writes Davies, “illustrate, quite literally, the human expression of fundamental desires, emotions, and fears in the form of demons, angels, spirits, gods, and abstruse symbols or abstract figures.” Davies introduces in accessible terms the main types of magic described, and reminds us that magic was once considered an art within the framework of the seven liberal arts, and continues to enchant creatives to this day.
Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein – read by Elizabeth Kim
Naomi Klein talks so much about her doppelgänger Naomi Wolf that I almost attributed this book to her. In the past few years, we’ve seen a boom in binary thinking, in part aided by social media and its algorithms and echo chambers. Here Klein considers what lies beyond, in the mirror world. Klein confronts both her personal “dark twin”—another author whom she has often been mistaken for who in recent years has espoused increasingly conspiratorial views—and the collective one, drawing from Jungian and Freudian thought and literary doppelgängers.
This is quite an esoteric cultural critique. Klein found in her doppelgänger the undesirable parts of herself and of shared culture, and saw more clearly “the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.” “Artificial intelligence is, after all, a mirroring and mimicry machine: we feed in the cumulative words, ideas, and images that our species has managed to amass (and digitise) over its history and these programs mirror back to us something that feels uncannily lifelike. A golem world.” She shows how liberals and progressives have missed the opportunity for debate and important conversations concerning issues such as lockdown and the covid vaccine, inadvertently defending the status quo in a bid to distance themselves from far-right conspiracy theorists; in neglecting such discussions we silence many demographics, including the disabled and BIPOC people, who have good reason to mistrust big Pharma. Thinking requires a conversation between two or more ideas that exist in ourselves. The branded self that exists so easily on social media is one-dimensional, non-thinking, and speaks in slogans. We define ourselves by saying who we are not. But for change to happen, Klein argues, we’d do well to eschew binary thinking and step inside the mirror world.
The Shining by Stephen King – read by Cristina Ferrandez
Shockingly, The Shining is the first Stephen King novel I’ve ever read, despite the many film adaptations of his work I’ve seen. Of course, it’s impossible to read the novel and not visualise Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, and even more so the labyrinthine carpeted hallways of Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel. However, the novel offers something that the film, by definition, can’t; here we are inside of Jack Torrance’s head experiencing, step by step, his descent into madness.
King masterfully interweaves a number of apparently disparate elements to create the perfect storm for the events that unfold: Jack’s history of alcoholism, Danny’s psychic abilities (his “shining”), the ghostly presences left behind by the hotel’s unsavoury history… The fact that Jack is writing a play works as an excellent mirroring device; as Jack becomes increasingly unstable under the weight of his failure to become a great American writer, his perspective on his characters also shifts as he comes to see them as mirrors of his wife and son. You probably already know what happens next, but just in case I will spare you the spoiler!
Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson – read by Elizabeth Kim
Gleeson’s debut novel is one of the most anticipated books of 2024 and I was excited to receive a proof in the post. Artist Nell joins a commune of women on a wild, rugged island. The islanders live alongside strange murmurings that seem to emanate from the island itself. This “wave-fucked” place with its “forest fern fuzz” and its “dank forest of mulch floor” and commune of women reminds me of the rural stretch of coast where I grew up. I am several chapters in and already captivated by the hauntingly beautiful writing and quiet mystery story. This is one to read in a cabin beside the sea with the rain pattering down on the sky roof; I am not reading it in such a place, but the elemental atmosphere is bringing me back to my childhood growing up in the West Country.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Simon Armitage – read by Elizabeth Dearnley
As the nights grow darker and icier, I’ve been returning to this incandescently beautiful and strange medieval poem telling the tale of a mysterious green knight who rides into King Arthur’s court one winter’s night, axe in one hand and holly branch in the other. Challenging the company to a “Christmas game”—you cut my head off and next year I’ll cut off yours—he sets in motion an eerie chain of events that ends with Sir Gawain riding out into the wilds of the Wirral to meet his supernatural adversary. Simon Armitage’s translation, which echoes the alliterative verse of the fourteenth-century original, is a masterpiece in its own right. Arguably the original folk horror, this one’s best enjoyed by candlelight on a snowy moonlit night.
Scotland the Strange: Weird Tales from Storied Lands, ed. Johnny Mains (British Library 2023) – read by Elizabeth Dearnley
This sumptuous purple hardback just arrived in the post and I can’t wait to get properly stuck in. The latest offering in the British Library’s hardback horror series, this volume contains a feast of weird tales from both well-known Scottish writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, and less familiar names such as Eliza Lynn Linton and Mrs Campbell of Dunstaffnage (who penned the evocatively titled ‘The Stag-Haunted Stream’). The book looks stunning as well, with its iridescent foiled cover glittering enticingly—definitely one to add to your spooky folklore collection.
This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright – read by Beth Ward
This Ragged Grace is a book lacking any overt magic or mysticism—as far as the more literal definitions of those words—though in its opening pages we do meet author Octavia Bright in “that superstitious realm—the age of 27,” on her knees before a makeshift altar.
“…each morning it was that introspection I strove for,” she writes, “in front of my altar, kneeling to prove that I meant it.”
But there is something enduringly haunted in this story, one chronicling Bright’s personal journey out of alcohol addiction, and the harrowing and otherworldly mirror narrative of her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. As Bright orients herself in this new place of remembering wrought by her abstention from drinking, her father begins to forget, his sense of self glitching into dissolution.
I felt haunted when I finished it, and I’m haunted by it still—by the beauty and dawn-like clarity of the prose, and by the way Bright renders so tenderly on the page that portal place, that gossamer-thin veil barely separating sobriety and addiction, loss and recovery, life and death, the ephemerality of memory and the inevitability of forgetting.